39 pages • 1 hour read
David Harry WalkerDavid Walker's Appeal
Nonfiction | Essay / Speech | Adult | Published in 1995A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Background
Historical Context: Slavery in the United States
Content Warning: This section of the guide discusses enslavement and racism.
African were first enslaved and transported to North America by Spanish colonialists at the start of the 16th century. By the time the United States declared its independence from Britain in 1776, chattel slavery was legal in all 13 American colonies. However, shortly after gaining independence, the country became divided on slavery. Northern states began the process of emancipation, creating a division between free Northern states and slave-holding Southern states. Although the importation of new enslaved Africans was prohibited, the domestic trade of enslaved people continued to thrive, especially as Southern states relied on the labor of enslaved people to fuel the agriculture-based economy. Enslaved people in the South often lived in terrible conditions, were subject to violence, and were forcibly separated from their families. Many attempted to seek freedom in free states in the North. Although the Fugitive Slave Clause stated that self-liberated people must be returned to their former enslavers, many Northerners were sympathetic, and networks existed to support self-liberated people.
As the United States acquired more territories over the course of the 19th century, the proportion of free states and slaveholding states threatened to unbalance, and Southern states began to worry about losing their enslaved workforce. In 1860, Abraham Lincoln won the presidential election after promising to halt the expansion of slavery in new US territories. This caused the enslaving South to secede, forming the Confederate States of America and initiating the Civil War. The war continued until 1865, when the Confederacy was defeated, and the Constitution’s 13th Amendment was ratified to outlaw slavery (except as punishment for a crime).
Literary Context: The Enslavement Narrative and Abolitionist Literature
When David Walker’s Appeal was published in 1829, there was no formal abolition movement in the United States, nor was there much literature on the topic of slavery or the experience of enslaved African Americans. In the late 18th century, enslaved poet Phillis Wheatley published a collection of poems, Complete Writings, which constituted the first written work by an African American. Several years later, her text was followed by The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano; or, Gustavus Vassa, the African, Written by Himself, which pioneered the genre of the narrative of enslaved people.
By the early 19th century, African American journalism was on the rise, including the publication of Freedom’s Journal, the first African American-owned newspaper in 1829. With these outlets, more African Americans began speaking out about the injustices they faced and the cruelty of slavery. Walker’s Appeal was the most explicit and incendiary of these early writings. Many considered his approach to be too extreme, and the Appeal was largely forgotten after its initial publication. However, by the mid-19th century, the abolitionist movement was growing, and African American literature was proliferating, including the publication of foundational narratives of enslaved people such as Frederick Douglass’s Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave, Written by Himself. Walker’s Appeal was reissued in 1848 and is now considered a foundation text in African American literature.
